When Science Sucks or, “In my day, Pluto was a REAL planet.”

I have had my heart broken many times. By friends, by family and by awesome hairdressers who decide to move to Queensland (Renata, I still have not forgiven you)… but I don’t think I will ever truly be able to recover from the news that I have been refusing to acknowledge for a couple of months now.

When I was little, I was obsessed with dinosaurs. I wanted to be a palaeontologist when I grew up. I knew countless names and species of dinosaurs. I had watched every dinosaur movie I could get my hands on. Even in my late teens when Walking With Dinosaurs aired on our TV screens in 1999, I thrilled to the scenes of big lizards stomping around the place. They looked so real!

“Hey Ren, what was your favourite dinosaur?” I hear you ask.

Well that’s a good question… because I’ve since discovered that my favourite dinosaur which developed from a love of the character called “Babypuss” in the 1979 classic, Daikyoryu No Jidai, or Age of the Great Dinosaurs in English (enjoy the random theme song from the movie there) NEVER EVEN EXISTED as I grew up knowing it.

Triceratops or … what? (Image from BoingBoing)

The Triceratops was my favourite dinosaur… and much like the Brontosaurus which was discovered to be a younger version of the Apatosaurus, it’s been ripped from the annals of science and time and people who apparently know this stuff are now saying that the Triceratops simply didn’t exist as we all knew it. It was a juvenile Torosaurus.

A FECKING WHAT?!

Oh science, why do you mess with my mind? It hurts me so.

There is small comfort out of this, however. Triceratops was discovered and named first and therefore whether or not it was a juvenile Torosaurus is moot.

From the paper itself:

“It was already known that triceratops skulls changed throughout their development, but not that the final result was a torosaurus. Torosaurus will now be abolished as a species and specimens reassigned to Triceratops, says Horner.”

So… Torosaurus is the lie… but so is the Triceratops… kinda.

Frankly, ever since Pluto was downgraded to a dwarf planet and not a real planet, I don’t what what to believe.

But here is a video that a friend and I made this morning. An Ode to the Triceratops.

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Stegosaurus. Not sure why but that has always been a favourite of mine closely followed by Diplodocus. Being the nerd that I am I will always have an unfashionable love of dinosaurs. Fourtunatley I had a son so dinosaurs tend to come with the territory. (not stereotyping, just saying. I mean the kid is only 16 months and loves dinosaurs already)

Also screw you science, Pluto is too a planet (just not a very big one). I was devastated when I found out it had been down graded…ok not devastated but slightly disheartened. The universe as I had come to know it had been changed beyond all recognition…or some equally dramatic scenario.